


The Only Difference Between Martyrdom and Suicide Is Press Coverage

by pressdbtwnpages



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-28
Updated: 2011-09-28
Packaged: 2017-10-24 04:09:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/258845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pressdbtwnpages/pseuds/pressdbtwnpages
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life after the Fall as seen through Dee's eyes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Only Difference Between Martyrdom and Suicide Is Press Coverage

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to [](http://howlinchickhowl.livejournal.com/profile)[**howlinchickhowl**](http://howlinchickhowl.livejournal.com/) for looking this over and [](http://coffeesuperhero.livejournal.com/profile)[**coffeesuperhero**](http://coffeesuperhero.livejournal.com/) for convincing me that writing this wasn't an entirely futile effort. Title stolen from a song by the same name by Panic! at the Disco.

  
It’s the end of the worlds and Billy is there. He’s good, kind and patient, and understands that her job is vital. She understands that his job is important too.

If the worlds hadn’t ended, Dee thinks they’d have been perfect for each other. But the worlds did end and the rules are changing. Dee has desires it never occurred to her to dream of before the Cylons. She’s alive and so many people aren’t and she _wants_. Easy isn’t enough.

Apollo - _Lee_ \- isn’t her type. He’s beautiful and charismatic and he would never be happy on Sagittaron. But Sagittaron doesn’t exist anymore. It’s harmless, their flirtation, her schoolgirl crush.

Billy proposes and Dee thinks she should say yes. She sees her life with him stretched out before her. How she would have to resign her commission and move to Colonial One because you can’t have a marriage on separate ships. How she’d wait up nights for a man who was always going to put another woman first. What would happen to them when the president died? Would the commander take her back? Could Billy find something to do on Galactica? Dee cares for Billy, but she loves Galactica. She belongs to people here, and they belong to her, the battlestar is her home and her family in a way nowhere else could ever be. Even before the war, Galactica made Dee feel like part of something. Now she is intrinsic in a way she never could have believed when the worlds were intact.

Just like that, it’s over - their relationship, Billy’s life - and Dee’s pressing Lee Adama’s wound closed like if she can just keep him here nothing has to change.

She can’t go to the morgue, can’t grieve, she’s already been so disloyal to Billy in her mind that she has no right to mourn him. So Dee holds Apollo’s hand and prays. For Billy, for that stricken look on Kara Thrace’s face when she saw what she had done and the fact that she is too cowardly to show up in Sick Bay. Dee maintains contact.

She and Lee fall into a relationship after that. It isn’t as difficult as she imagined it. The glares from the president and the crew’s gossip fade into background noise. Starbuck is surprisingly gracious in her smirky way, so much so that Dee begins to doubt what she saw on Cloud 9.

Starbuck can’t do what Dee can, pull Lee back from the edge, thaw his numbness with her body. She tries not to gloat at the other woman.

They are Apollo and Starbuck, whatever that’s worth, and Dee can sacrifice a night or two with him so that he can play Triad with the pilots. She’s not going to be that girl who objects when her boyfriend dances with another woman and disappears with his best friend for the whole night.

Starbuck is married, Dee’s engaged, and Lee is sitting beside her vibrating with barely leashed emotion. Dee doesn’t know what happened on that rock. It doesn’t matter. Starbuck will always be between her and Lee. Dee thinks that’s okay, between Billy and Gianne and Zak and the rest of the Twelve Colonies, there’s plenty of space in their bed for Kara Thrace too.

She says ‘yes’ to Lee because she said ‘no’ to Billy. Because even though he’s the commander of the Pegasus, marrying him is still as close to marrying Galactica as anyone can come. Because he needs her to.

Starbuck doesn’t come to the wedding. Neither does Laura Roslin. That’s alright. Dee doesn’t need to rub her private victory in their faces. It’s enough to know that she won.

Even without Starbuck there, she’s there. In Lee’s hesitations. The way he flinches every time there’s a call from planetside. The way he’s brutal and weak in his command at the same time.

When the basestars appear on DRADIS, a frisson of relief sparks up Dee’s spine. She wonders for a moment if she is a Cylon, but then she recalls that Starbuck is planetside and Lee is not. She smiles grimly and follows orders as the fleet jumps away.

The months that follow test her, test her marriage as she struggles to support her husband. Few would have guessed it - Dee herself not among them - but the exodus has been good for Lee. He is strong and noble under pressure, cracks when things get simple. Then, he’s stubborn and difficult, even lazy, and the bitter part of Dee that has been widening slowly since the destruction of the colonies wonders what Lee would be like if Starbuck were up here with them.

Lee’s orders are simple. All the Pegasus has to do is sit and guard the fleet. But somehow even the thought of Starbuck springs Dee’s husband into long-dormant action, disobeying commands and sacrificing their home at the possibility of rescuing her. Dee hopes Starbuck hasn’t survived that planet.

Of course she survives. She’s Starbuck. There seems to be nothing she cannot do. But she comes back changed, angry, bitter. She avoids Lee and spends her time causing trouble with Saul Tigh.

The Starbuck-shaped space in their lives should have sealed itself up with the reappearance of the actual, living, breathing person, but it hasn’t. Lee and Starbuck’s pointed avoidance of one another just makes it all the more obvious that there is something to avoid.

Dee catches Sam Anders slipping off-ship one night and she wants to say something. To have a secret signal or buy the man a drink. They have so much in common.

And then Apollo and Starbuck Dance. There is no hiding anymore, not for them or for their poor, blind, cuckolded spouses. Dee doesn’t need to see the whole thing, all she needs to know she already does.

She’s not a fool. She knows what Lee is doing with Starbuck in storage sheds and on donut runs. It happens because she lets it happen. Because Starbuck and Apollo are good for each other in the abstract, but not in the actual. They will burn themselves out on this and Dee will be the victim, the hero, the brave wife who wrapped her rival’s hands and flew them both to safety.

And then it will be done.

Kara flies into a storm and gets herself blown up and somehow Dee wins and loses it all in the same moment. She can’t compete with a memory, she can only comfort herself with a broken man and wonder if he would cry out like this at her loss.

It seems unfathomable to Dee that after all they have been through together, her husband can keep surprising her in the most horrible ways. That he would take up Gaius Baltar’s cause is only mildly surprising, she supposes Lee has always liked underdogs. That he would resign his duty and abandon his father is inconceivable.

Dee thought leaving would make him see her for the first time in weeks. Instead she doesn’t even seem to register on his DRADIS.

Kara Thrace lives. Or is a Cylon. No one quite knows, but equally certain is the fact that no one seems to care. Dee couldn’t compete with Kara as a shade, she certainly can’t compete with a daemon.

There isn’t anything for Dee to do but keep her head down. She hears of the political adventures of Lee Adama through CIC gossip and over the wireless and pretends not to care. She hears of Starbuck’s many misadventures every frakking time she turns around. Dying, living, searching for Earth, making allies out of humanity’s enemy, there is just so much. And Dee has no idea how much a part of it all Lee has been. She’s not sure she cares anymore. She’s so tired.

Dee doesn’t think anyone in the fleet is surprised that it is Starbuck who finds Earth, indirectly or not. And given that it’s Starbuck, the foreshadowing of the condition of the planet should have been written on the walls. If Starbuck was drawn to it, how could Earth be anything but scorched, damaged beyond livability? Dee wishes she’d understood just how destructive Starbuck’s touch is years ago. She could have saved herself so much time and energy and hurt. If she’d just left Starbuck’s toys alone, maybe she wouldn’t be so tired now.

Lee shares her raptor back to Galactica and mistakes her exhaustion for disappointment. They eat together, reminisce, and hope. It’s what Dee always imagined their marriage to be. He kisses her outside her quarters, warm and sweet and absent something vital. Dee wonders if she ever really loved him. If they were ever anything to each other but easy inconvenience.

She’s so tired. She can’t take care of anyone anymore. Surely, just this once, she can count on Starbuck to watch after Lee outside of a viper.

Dee picks up the gun she’d been assigned for the trip to Earth. She hadn’t returned it. She takes a deep breath. Touches a hand to her lips, still warm from Lee’s kiss.

She pulls the trigger.


End file.
